Sweet Science

Carbohydrate research Todd Lowary gets a nice write-up on the U of A news feed recognizing his Killam Annual Professor award.  Well done!

Movie Friday: Seven Psychopaths

Seven Psychopaths looks interesting, in a perhaps overly cute and self-conscious Tarantino fashion.  The director, Martin McDonagh, previously did In Bruges, an interesting piece starring Brendan Gleason and Colin Farrell as hitmen on the run after a botched job.  This one has Farrell in it again, but also Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken and Tom Waits.  Oh, and Woody Harrelson as a violent gangster trying to recover his dognapped Shih Tzu.

The overall Rotten Tomatoes score is 84%, though somewhat lower for the top critics.  However, if the world's most reliable reverse barometer Rex Reed doesn't like it, that's good enough for me:  it's gotta be good.

Here's the trailer:

Test

Access Copyright

Song of the Week: No Self Control

Trying to start a new tradition on this blog, and in honour of my obsessive snooping around in the blogosphere (and periodic posting of my own), I'll start with this Peter Gabriel classic from 1980.  So many great things about this song, and indeed the whole album:  fantastic, disturbing lyrics; that "gated drum" sound that was explicitly created for this album; and perhaps most of all, that hypnotic xylophone!

Sad Movie Friday: Grave of the Fireflies

I recently watched the 1988 Japanese anime film, Grave of the Fireflies.  This is a depiction of the fate of a young brother and sister in the waning days of the Second World War.  Their house is destroyed in a fire-bombing and they are orphaned, and then things go downhill from there.

This is an extremely depressing movie, but very well made.  Interestingly, the animation was done by Studio Ghibli, very soon after their inception.  It enjoys a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 96%, and this is certainly appropriate.  However, I caution anyone contemplating watching it to be prepared for a downerific evening.

Here's Roger Ebert talking at length about this film, and Japanese anime in general:

The McMaster Effect

I have been bemused for several years at the way McMaster seems to outperform Alberta in many university rankings.  The latest Times rankings are only the most recent.  Are they actually better, or is there some metric that is capturing something that they do and giving it more weighting than it deserves?

Access Copyright

I posted earlier in the summer on the U of A's apparent move towards settling with Access Copyright, at a very steep premium.  In the latest CAUT Bulletin, there is a short piece about the increasing isolation of Access Copyright in the face of continuing challenges by universities to their extortionate demands.  This caused me to search the U of A website to determine whether they have followed through with their plans to jump aboard the badly listing HMS Access Copyright, and found that there is nothing newer than the June Folio article that provoked my original post.  It's the usual information blackout that we have come to expect from this administration.  Does anyone know whether we are still committed to this highly questionable course of action?

Economic Impact

Studies like this always make me a little nervous.  Yes, I agree that large research universities play a role in the economic development of the surrounding areas, and that such an impact can potentially be quantified.  My concern here is two-fold.  First, if the study is conducted by people at the university whose impact is being measured, and who therefore have an axe to grind, the credibility of the numbers can be called into question.  Second, should we really fall into the facile trap of packaging a university's value to the community in terms of tangible economic impact?  I would like to think that a strong public university that provides a rigorous education to its citizens is of great intrinsic value, regardless of its direct economic impact.